Go Green for Preschool: Using Recyclables to Teach Your Child

Go Green for Preschool: Using Recyclables to Teach Your Child

Author: Pamela Palmer

Under your supervision, your child's booster seat at the kitchen table can be transformed temporarily into a "school desk", on which fun, homemade manipulatives can be sorted and formed into letters and numbers. If you cringe at the mentioned of the word "homemade" and think only the "Martha Stewarts" of the world can handle that-be assured-my suggestions are easy with a capital "E".

"Recycling" Creativity

Recyclable items are everywhere in your home, look around at what you routinely recycle or throw out. Toilet paper rolls can be collected and turned into puppets. If you are not the artistic type, don't fret-a quick marker-drawn face on one end of a toilet paper roll and instantly you have a Superhero! Kids love to pretend, so with just some encouragement from you, and that "artistic handicap" of yours will help them exercise their imaginations. Have your little ones insert their fingers in the center-and your puppet comes alive for the cost of the ink! Gather your recyclables and do a little brainstorming!

Gather Up Collections of "Stuff"

I collected lids from milk and juice bottles, disinfected them, and tossed them aside in a plastic container on my counter. Within a few weeks, I had an interesting collection that were great for learning patterns, an important pre-reading and pre-math skill. Look for plain-colored plastic lids vs. the ones with writing on them. Collect ones that match in size and color, and also collect a variety of sizes for sorting. Add a few plastic bowls and you can play endless sorting games! "Going Green" never was such fun!

Look At "Junk" Differently

Ideas will abound when you check-out your recycling bins. Margarine tubs with lids can be slit at the top, and "Presto" you have a cash register for playing money games. Egg cartons can be transformed into boxes for you child's collections. Newspaper taped together can be morphed into large sheets of drawing paper. Kids love to color to "themselves" after having their whole bodies outlined with fat markers on a large sheet of paper.

Old magazines can be treasure troves for photographs to decorate your creations. We glued magazine, cut-out photos to paper plates, tied them together on one side with yarn and made instant "books". This is a fun way to allow your child to practice her "writing" skills. I still have a motorcycle-themed book in my son's keepsake box! Include your child in this discovery process. You can ask him, "How can we use these plastic lids for school?" You will be amazed at the suggestions you will get!

Explore New Ideas For Old Items

Once you start on the adventure of making your own preschool supplies you will never look at a box the same way again! Shoeboxes can be transformed into panoramas with glued-in miniature toys and crayon-colored backgrounds. Appliance boxes decorated by your preschool artist and with windows cut-out (by an adult); can become a cozy "Reading Room". Just add a light source through the "ceiling" and throw some pillows inside.

Cereal boxes can yield a harvest of colorful, cut-out letters. Cover them with clear contact paper and they last forever! Busy, little fingers love to sort them. Empty shoe boxes decorated with construction paper, convert into light-weight building blocks. Your child's architectural designs with be limitless and environmental-friendly!

Brainstorm Around The House

Look around your home for inexpensive items that you normally stock. Dried beans and spray-painted pasta make excellent finger-friendly counters. I found numerous uses for bulk-bought plastic straws and coffee stirrers. We bound them together to show One-Tens-and-Hundreds. We formed letters with them on the floor. We used them as puppet arms.

Multi-shaped pasta and Fruit Loops can be used to make patterned necklaces. Tape one end of a length of yarn to a table top and let little fingers do the threading. Remove and tie in a bow and let the Artist wear her masterpiece. Paper plates can be transformed magically into masks. Coffee filters are great for mini-drawing paper, puppet hair, and mini-Art frames. Your house is full of preschool curriculum!

Keep you eyes open and let your imagination run wild! Cookie sheets can double as a surface for magnetic letters or a base for messy projects. Bowls, pans, and lids can be musical instruments, just add a plastic serving spoon and a child's energy! It might be noisy, but it is unbeatable (excuse the pun) as an introduction to rhythm for little ones. Drums made from round oatmeal boxes decorated with construction paper are easy to make. Paper towel rolls, with wax paper and a rubber band on one end, can be turned instantly into a kazoo! You and your child can make music with things that you already have in your house.

Handmade vs. Manufactured

Contrary to what you think "expensive and factory-made", does not equal "educationally-successful", or for that matter, "memorable". My oldest daughter, who recently graduated with honors from a local public high school, still talks with fondness of the homemade school supplies we used in her preschool years. She recently paid me the greatest compliment by saying she wanted to teach her kids in the exact same way that I taught her.

I'm not saying throw out every whirling, buzzing, manufactured gizmo that overflows from you child's bedroom, but I am encouraging you to move toward the fun and simplicity of homemade toys and games. You will never regret it! It's Green and it's cheap--good for the environment and your bank account!

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/homeschooling-articles/go-green-for-preschool-using-recyclables-to-teach-your-child-834809.html

About the Author:

Pamela Palmer is the founder and writer of Natural Cleaning Product Reviews at http://www.greenkeen.blogspot.com . Pam is also a contributing “Green” writer for the ezine, Suite 101, http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/pamelapalmer . She has written for Clay Times Magazine, a ceramics magazine for artists, teachers, and students and other print publications, as well. She resides in Western Maryland, near the mountains and enjoys writing poetry from the porch of her almost one-hundred-year-old house. She is the wife of a very patient man for the last 21 years and is Mom to two energetic teens, a goofy dog and a street-smart cat. Visit her poetry blog http://www.goldapples.wordpress.com when you get the chance.

Sometimes the Student is the Teacher

A few days ago, my five-year-old daughter Peyton asked me what our carbon footprint was.

I wasn't aware that she knew anything about carbon footprints, or that it would ever have occurred to her to THINK about a carbon footprint.  But, I  don't know how she found out about Hannah Montana and High School Musical, either, as we don't have cable or satellite TV.  Clearly the girl has resources.  Vast, hidden resources.

Truthfully, I didn't know what our number was anyway. I wasn't sure I wanted to know, because in all honesty, we're new to this whole "Green" thing.  Most of our green initiatives around our household have not been specifically tailored to saving our environment, but rather for providing us with a better quality of life. For example, we eat almost completely organic and we're working on moving all of our dietary needs to only things that we can find locally, farmed in a place we are welcome to visit if we'd like, in a sustainable manner. That means we're going to be joining a CSA, we're moving toward eating only grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic free beef, cage free eggs and raw dairy. But none of that was to protect the planet, it was to protect ourselves. We also cloth diaper, but not because it lowers our donation to the local landfill, rather to prevent bleeding diaper rash. We use reusable food storage not to eliminate waste, but because it's cheaper. Cheap is the reason why we have Energy Star rated appliances, turn off lights and televisions and unplug things when they're not in use. It's just cheaper! We reuse a lot of our potential recyclables and have turned a lot of them into creative and beautiful Kindergarten craft projects. (My favorite one is the bath tub scoop. But I also enjoy a little milk jug bowling and nothing beats a milk jug for pool floaties) Really, we should just move to returnable glass bottles, but the toys we can make out of milk jugs are too fun.

At any rate, we went to The Nature Conservancy and used their calculator to find out our carbon footprint. As I explained to Peyton, a carbon footprint is a number that indicates how large our greenhouse gas emissions are. (Of course then I had to explain greenhouse gasses and why they were bad, but that's a whole 'nother Oprah.) While it's not the only measurement of our environmental responsibility, it's a good start. I was a little apprehensive, because we drive a minivan and aren't really good consumers of our local transit system. I know we could do better in that arena, and I hoped that some of our other initiatives would help balance that out.

I blogged the results in my personal blog, Mom and Machine. You can go there to read the rest of it, but the whole event got me to thinking: if she's this interested in the environment now, what can I do to make that a lifelong passion? How can I work this into the things we do as a matter of our everyday activities in a way that recylcing becomes second nature, that reusing and reducing become things that she just does without thinking about them.

And then it occurred to me that we teach Kindergarteners every day that they ought to clean up their messes. We tell them to take care of their toys, their backpacks, their clothes. So, why SHOULDN'T we be teaching them to take care of their environment as a natural extention of the "clean up after yourself" rule? I spend a lot of time trying to convince Peyton that if she doesn't take care of things, they will be ruined or they will go away and we won't be able to replace them.

Isn't that exactly what will happen to our planet if we fail to take care of it?

So, for my first Student Saturday blog here at Blog on Smog, I thought I'd take some time to write down 10 things we do to teach Peyton about the environment.

1. We read stories and write our own. We've checked out some great books at our local library, here are a few:

The Lorax (I know, you thought I was going to get all preachy and only post boring books that nobody would really want to read, didn't you?)
Why Should I Recycle? (There's a whole series, Why Should I Save Energy?, Why Should I Save Water?, Why Should I Protect Nature?)
Where Does the Garbage Go?
The Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
The Adventures of a Plastic Bottle: A Story About Recycling
The Earth and I
Recycled Crafts Box (This was my favorite. I'm a craftaholic.)

We like to do more than just read stories, though. We like to write our own. So, we'll take something that we see outside or read about in a news story and we'll write a story about it. For example, if we see some litter on our walk to the park, we'll write a story about where that came from, or where it's going. Or we'll turn the litter into a character for a story and make it tell what it thinks about being left in the dirt.

2. We take "Five Can Walks". We take a walk through our neighborhood with a canvas shopping bag and collect discarded soda cans we find on the way. We make a rule that we can't turn back until we have five cans. Then we put those five cans in a bag in our garage and when we have a whole bag full, we take them to the recycling center. Peyton gets to keep any money we make. Sometimes, if it's a really beautiful day or we're feeling particularly bold, we'll make it a Ten Can Walk. We do other things, too--Five Page Walks (paper), Five Bag Walks, Five Junk Walks.

3. We use whatever we can for crafts. Egg cartons make great "crap collectors". We use them to store buttons and beads and brads, as well as glitter that's been hopelessly mixed up. We make paper dolls out of things like cereal boxes and Webkinz storage houses out of the sturdier cardbord boxes. I use toilet paper and paper towel rolls for ribbon, and we make container gardens and pencil holders out of tin cans.

4. We learn about the weather. Climate change is a reality, so we talk about things as they happen--for instance, as I'm typing this, Colorado (my home state) is in the middle of a major spring snowstorm. In contrast, we had a winter with almost now snow and very little other precipitation. So, we're talking with Peyton about what this means for the summer--how our low amounts of rain and snow will mean that we won't have as much water to water flowers and grass, and how we'll have to be careful about what we use in our house, too.

5. We minimize water waste.  We turn off water when we brush our teeth, take short showers and baths in not much water (but lots of bubbles). We all have cute water bottles that we fill with filtered tap water instead of buying bottled water. We do BIG loads of laundry instead of a lot of small loads.

6. We visit our local library.  We check out books instead of buying them (unless it's a beloved story or a book with recipes or craft instructions/ideas.  We check those out first, and then buy them as necessary.). We give away one toy whenever we get a new one. We have a lot of clutter in our house (we live in less than 1000 square feet!) so not only does it help our environment to not purchase more things we'll eventually have to throw away, but it reduces the chaos in our own home.

7. When we go to the grocery store, we talk about packaging. We count cans and boxes on the shelves and then talk about what goes into producing all of those cans, and how much space all of that trash takes up. We try to buy things with minimal packaging--so we buy products in bulk and then package individual portions in reusable containers.

8. We don't buy any more tupperware containers. We reuse the packaging from cottage cheese, tubs of butter, condiment jars and cream cheese tubs. The yogurt containers that have the foil lids make excellent paint/water containers for craft time. When we can't reuse them, we put them in the craft pile to use creatively some other way.

9. We use our public transportation system for drives into the city, we walk to the park, and we mostly use our vehicle only when we have to. We talk about how using our car puts a lot of emissions into the atmosphere and how those emissions are causing the problems with climate change.

10. We practice what we preach. Isn't this the thing every parenting expert dictates? Do what you want your kids to do. I can't reasonably expect Peyton to want to recycle, to use less water and to conserve energy if I'm tossing a can over my shoulder, taking half-an-hour long showers and leaving the TV on all night. Kids love to emulate their parents, so the easiest way to teach them to be good custodians of the environment is to just be one yourself.

by Amber Dubois